FDR Was A Genius!

But first--- we left the trailer in Missoula for the week while we sprint to Seattle to visit family. Driving without the trailer was a thrill. We could pass other cars. Gas lasted forever. 

The highway followed a narrow pass through steep forested mountains across Idaho and the remainder of the Rockies. Then we came to the gently rolling hills of eastern Washington. It looked like wheat was just coming up.

We stopped at the Grand Coulee Dam for the afternoon and night. Thank you Rob and Nan for the suggestion!

So about FDR.....a number of places along this trip we've come to places where it was still obvious how hard life must have been during the depression. FDR fostered public works programs that gave people work during desperate times, but also built things that normal political wrangling would have prevented.

A project to build a dam on the Columbia river for irrigation of the Columbia Valley had been stalled for 13 years. In 1933 FDR jump started it with Government money. It provided thousands of jobs. As it progressed and WW II began, the project was expanded to include generation of electricity to help the war effort. It was completed in 1942. The dam was enlarged and more generators added with completion in 1980.

The first picture below shows the dam with a tour bus on top at the right. It used 12 million cubic yards of concrete for construction and became the largest concrete structure in the world. It is 300 ft high above the water.

 In the next picture, the parallel metal "pipes" up on the hill side are used by the dam's pumps to pump 2% of the river's water into a canal system that irrigates 500,000 acres in the Columbia valley!

( Keep 1933 - 1980 in mind. ) This dam has 18 water driven turbine electrical generators and is the largest hydroelectric producer in the USA. The picture below shows an 80 ft diameter blue cover over just one turbine/generator. The horizontal yellow thing is a crane. The one farthest away can lift 2000 tons!!!!

The water-feed tunnels coming down the slope on the right each feed one turbine. Each tunnel carries twice as much water as the entire Colorado River. A single turbine makes enough power for the entire city of Seattle!

Before the modern computer control system, the power from each generator (enough for Seattle) was monitored by the simple instrument set here.

And the water turbine below was connected to the generator top end by the 11 ft diameter steel shaft shown here----Enough power for Seattle carried by a single giant steel shaft????

Today were headed to the Petrified Forest (although I don't think it's changed much). Then on to Seattle.